Real-time effectiveness of COVID19 control strategies [Funder: Genome BC]

Estimating how well current control measures like social distancing are working is crucial to answering questions about how we should relax them: when is it safe to re-open schools? Can we better focus COVID-19 control measures to protect those most at-risk? In this ongoing pandemic, it is essential to be able to both to both forecast measures' impact and monitor their success. This project will create mathematical models that integrate the many current streams of COVID-19 data to provide potential answers to these critical social questions and forecast outcomes in near-real time. The team will quickly develop a statistical test for when we can expect to see the effects of policy changes, as well as models estimating the strength of control measures, projecting the effects of new control measures, and determining the effectiveness of existing measures based on comparisons between locations. Complex models allow for different possible resolutions to major uncertainties in order to best understand when and how restrictions can be relaxed. This work will go beyond short-term forecasting and beyond the needs of British Columbia, as the tools generated from this work will be applied to Canadian and international data.